The Artist and the Propaganda Machine:How Fernando Bryce Retells 20th-Century History

His series “Südsee” is currently being shown at the Deutsche
Bank-sponsored California-Pacific Triennial in the Orange County Museum
of Art (OCMA). Fernando Bryce draws his way through the violent history
of the 20th century almost manically, investigating how media images
influence our view of the world. Oliver Koerner von Gustorf met the
artist, who works in Lima and Berlin.

“It’s about power structures and paintings,” says Fernando Bryce
amicably, as we look down from his balcony on to Neue Schönhauser
Strasse. Seen from above, Berlin-Mitte with its cafes and concept
stores looks almost like a village. Bryce rented this apartment at a
very early stage, before the boom began. It is bright and tidy, but
almost disappointingly empty, because given his art, you could imagine
the artist (who divides his time between Berlin and Lima) in a
completely different environment: walking amidst wall-high cabinets and
shelves, through dark endless corridors formed from piles of newspapers
and archive pictures. The material that the 48-year-old has viewed in
the last two decades for his extensive drawing cycles could probably
fill up gymnasiums.

With each series, Bryce draws his way further through world and
colonial history, through the horrors and utopias of the modern age,
the precipices and triumphs of mass culture and politics. There is
something almost manic about this works. Like a reproduction machine,
he assimilates all kinds of documents of 20th-century history:
newspaper reports, movie posters, magazines, illustrated books,
advertisements. And when Bryce spits them out again in his
black-and-white cycles, often consisting of more than a hundred
pictures, the original material seems to be homogenized due to his
graphic drawing style. He calls this a “filter” that makes everything
the same, that extinguishes hierarchies and interpretations as well as
the colors and materiality of the original document.

The people in his ink drawings, no matter whether they are politicians,
aborigines, film stars, athletes or soldiers, bear a resemblance to
comic strip characters from the period between the 1930s and the Cold
War. In his work, text and writing become a kind of rhythmic ornament
that moves across the wall from frame to frame, like different patterns
of one and the same material that is processed.

“I’m actually like a schoolchild who ’s given homework that he does,”
says Bryce with a grin. “It began in around 2000, with my first big
series Atlas Peru, consisting of 500 drawings. I wanted to
investigate the history of my country since the 1930s, to develop an
image of Peru over a period of a half-century. I use the term “image”
here in a very broad sense. I incorporated all kinds of things that
have to do with representation – advertising, tourist brochures,
political manifestos, articles from arts sections of newspapers,
publications on architecture and engineering. I was interested in
tracing the whole thing and restructuring it, retelling it in a
constellation of drawings. That is my task. Then, from Peru, I slowly
approached different aspects of Latin America, such as the gap between
the north and south and postcolonial history. After Latin America, I
was eager to deal with specific geopolitical and global political
events. But primarily through images, of course. My material is
everything that has been printed, that has been propagated. Naturally,
this can’t be grasped in all its complexity and variety. But I try to
create a specific, singular kind of story.” Indeed, Bryce creates a
kind of mental cinema with his work in which viewers can produce their
own stories and connections from countless fragments. The
superstructure of his series are the great narratives of the 20th
century: The Spanish Civil War (The Spanish War, 2003), U.S. hegemony (Américas, 2005), the era of colonialism and imperialism (Südsee, 2007 and The World,
2008). Without being polemical or didactic, Bryce’s drawings reveal the
Eurocentric perspective of these tales, the propaganda machinery and
historical violence underlying them. This has not only made him one of
Latin America’s most important contemporary artists. For more than a
decade, his works have been exhibited at major international
exhibitions, for example, at the 2003 Venice Biennale, the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and the 2011 Lyon Bienniale. He is represented in important collections, in the MoMA, the Tate, and the Deutsche Bank Collection.

Bryce’s series Südsee (The South Seas) is currently on view at the first California-Pacific Triennial in the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), whose main sponsor is Deutsche Bank. With 32 artists from 15 countries, the event, which succeeds the California Biennial,
is expanding its focus beyond the USA to the entire Pacific region. It
is doing so not only because national borders are becoming increasingly
transparent. In the view of Dan Cameron,
the curator of the Triennial, a paradigm change is also taking place.
The trans-Atlantic exchange between New York, Paris, London, and
Berlin, which had a decisive influence on 20th-century art, is being
increasingly replaced by the cultural and artistic transfer between the
neighboring Pacific States of the Pacific.

Fernando Bryce is surely a protagonist of this development, someone who
stands for the up-and-coming Latin American art scene. He has worked in
studios in Peru and Germany since the 1990s, feels at home artistically
in Lima and Berlin. Südsee engages with a chapter of repressed German
history: the colonization of Papua New Guinea at the end of the 19th
century. Bryce was particularly interested in the connection between
political and ethnological interests and the “exotic” image of the
South Seas, which also inspired Modern artists, who longed for a more
original state. First, he read secondary literature, he says, and then
he spent months in the archives of the Berlin National Library
with prepared lists. In the library, he found all kinds of sources,
including publications on the then young science of anthropometry,
which tried to find purported links between anatomical features, race,
and character.

In the course of his research, Bryce or one of his assistants
photographed every book page or document that interested him right in
the library. This was followed by the copying process. First, the rough
outlines are traced and the drawings finished with ink. Bryce calls
this act “mimetic analysis,” which is more contemplation than
imitation. “It’s a little like a copy machine, but at the same time it
has something meditative,” says Bryce. “I don’t want to romanticize it,
but I like the figure of the medieval monk, although that's not me of
course.” Subsequently the drawings are hung on the wall, a selection is
made, and the chosen drawing are put together in ever-new combinations
based on a aesthetic and content-related criteria. “Then I think about
what I need. Maybe it’s too political now? Do I need more ethnology?”

Bryce takes the position of both the reader and the author. And this allows him, as Natalia Maijluf, the director of the Museo de Arte de Lima, writes in the catalogue for his retrospective Drawing History,
to construct “new versions of old stories.” His drawing style may seem
a bit nostalgic. The historical events he refers to may have occurred
in a past century. But the ideologically determined mechanisms of image
circulation and production that Bryce exposes in his combinations of
drawings, is very topical. It is not so much the history itself he
traces as the media propaganda with which he writes history. Much of
the visual language Bryce’s drawings develop seems strangely familiar:
stereotypical poses of rulers and the oppressed, staged images of the
foreign and exotic, maps and diagrams with which the world is measured
and explained.

“I’m interested in understanding images as political fact,” says Bryce.
When I’m in the library, I think very simply. What lies in front of me
are facts, products. They were made at a certain time by certain
people. These media images are both product and construct. When I see a
picture that fascinates me, I’m always interested in its function.
That’s my political view of pictures. I wonder what it was made for and
I do something different with it.”